Janice Wylie (above) and Emily Hoffert were “career girls” living on the Upper East Side when they were murdered in 1963. (Copy Photo)

(Copy Photo)

Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were “career girls” living on the Upper East Side when they were murdered in 1963. (Copy Photo)

Janice Wylie (above) and Emily Hoffert were “career girls” living on the Upper East Side when they were murdered in 1963. (Copy Photos)

George Whitmore Jr. (above) was coerced into falsely confessing to the murders. The real killer, Ricky Robles (inset) is still serving time in Attica. (
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On sunny, flawless Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963 — 50 years ago this month — blond and vivacious Janice Wylie, 21, and her roommate, scholarly Emily Hoffert, 23, were viciously murdered in their apartment in what was thought to be the safe, fashionable Upper East Side.

Their slaying was dubbed the “Career Girl Murders” — the biggest, most sensational, most extraordinary crime and police investigation in New York’s history at the time, one that would have a chilling effect on the cops, on the prosecutors and on the courts nationally.

Wylie, from a famous family of writers, and Hoffert, the daughter of a prominent Minneapolis physician, lived in a $250-a-month, five-room apartment close to Central Park — number 3C, 57 E. 88th St. — a rent-controlled building with a uniformed doorman and an awning over the entrance. A third roommate, Patricia Tolles, 21, who worked for the book division of Time-Life, came home late in the afternoon and found the apartment in shambles. Frightened, she called Wylie’s father, who lived just two blocks away. In a bedroom, he discovered the girls’ bloodied bodies tied together with strips of torn bedsheets.

They had been stabbed numerous times, and Wylie’s nude body was covered with Noxzema, used in the sexual assault of her by the monster who had broken into the apartment. Veteran homicide detectives had never seen such carnage.

THE ROOMMATES

Wylie worked as a copy girl at the Midtown headquarters of Newsweek, where she ran errands for editors and reporters — filling paste pots, distributing wire-service copy and other routine tasks. Her real goal, however, was Hollywood, or Broadway, and she had taken acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

On the day of the murder, the magazine was bustling more than usual, covering the big story, the massive march in Washington, which culminated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

But Wylie never showed up for her late-morning shift, which infuriated her co-workers who were covering for her. Calls to her apartment went unanswered.

Had she gone to the march? Was she on a date? Janice had many men in her life, as the cops would soon learn, which initially would lead them on lots of bizarre wild-goose chases to frustrating dead ends in their massive hunt for the killer, or killers.

Wylie was a society girl from power and privilege. Her doting father was Max Wylie, an important and creative ’60s-era advertising executive — a genuine Don Draper. He had served on the faculty of New York University and had written a number of novels, plays and textbooks.

His brother, Janice’s uncle, was the critically acclaimed author Philip Gordon Wylie, best known for his bestselling 1942 essay collection, “Generation of Vipers,” along with a slew of mystery novels and works of science fiction.

The other murder victim, Wylie’s roommate, was short, bespectacled, small-town Emily Hoffert, from Edina, Minn., who had arrived in New York just 39 days before she and Wylie’s lives were viciously snuffed out.

A shy brunette, Hoffert was the polar opposite of happy-go-lucky, blond Manhattan sophisticate Wylie, who liked to party at the Stork Club. Hoffert was a serious academic, with a degree from Smith College, who was about to embark on a teaching career. Hoffert and her older sister by five years, Mary, had been adopted.

“Emily and I were wonderful friends as well as sisters,” Mary Hoffert Bryson, 82, told The Post on the eve of the 50th anniversary of her sister’s death.

“My sister was a very bright, very good person, and when I decided I wanted to be an English teacher, she sort of went along with the same idea. She was very good in languages, and she had a double major in English and Russian literature. She was in New York just for that summer before she would start her first year of teaching. It was just a temporary place, staying in that apartment where the murder took place.”

THE SUSPECT

On the day Wylie and Hoffert were slain, Walter Arm, a former newspaperman, who was the deputy police commissioner who dealt with the press, was in a Times Square bar knocking down a vodka and tonic when word of the murders was relayed to him. He immediately informed reporters that there was a major case brewing.

“There was the class aspect of the girls, the fact that they were prominent and the threat of living alone in Manhattan that touched a nerve,” says Kenneth Gross, then a young reporter on The Post’s police beat. “The murder, the day of the freedom march in Washington, a lot of things were tied together to remind people that the city and the country were undergoing some transformation. It was a great turning point in the culture.”

As the search for the Wylie-Hoffert killer continued, hundreds of men, many of them oddballs and sociopaths, were pursued and questioned, including dates of Wylie, whom the detectives always assumed was the target of the killer because of her looks and partying lifestyle.

Some investigators even speculated that the killer might have been a woman who oddly walked two babies in a stroller around Manhattan. Finally she was confronted, and the cops were startled to discover that the “babies” were actually two small monkeys swaddled in pink blankets.

Then George Whitmore Jr. surfaced.

He was a slow, meek, acne-faced 19-year-old African-American, an eighth-grade dropout who had never been in trouble with the law, who came from the crime-riddled Brownsville section of Brooklyn via Wildwood, NJ.

Some eight months after the Career Girl Murders, Whitmore was taken into custody in Brooklyn near the scene of where a young woman, Elba Borrero, had been sexually assaulted by a man who had fled. Whitmore had innocently been waiting to be picked up by a friend and taken to a job site. But in the police station house, he was railroaded by detectives pressured to solve the Wylie-Hoffert case, which had gone cold.

Whitmore was never physically abused. Instead, he was isolated in an interrogation room and, for almost 24 hours, underwent nonstop grilling from hardened detectives playing good cop, bad cop.

They lied to him that he would never go to jail, that Wylie and Hoffert were alive. All they wanted, they told him, was for him to simply sign a 61-page confession.

Unsophisticated, uneducated, brow-beaten — and without any legal representation — the frightened teenager finally agreed to admit to the Wylie-Hoffert murder, along with the recent assault of the Borrero woman (who would wrongly identify him as her attacker) and the unsolved murder of another woman, Minnie Edmonds, a 41-year-old black house cleaner who had been beaten and stabbed on April 14, 1964, some seven months after the Career Girls Murder. Edmonds was murdered about a block from where Borrero was assaulted.

Whitmore later explained that confessing was a way to stop the brutal questioning and be permitted to go home.

Bogus evidence also was used against Whitmore.

In his wallet, detectives had found a number of snapshots, most of them of African-Americans, but one crumpled photo was of two white girls, one a blonde. One of the veteran detectives with a tough-guy reputation who was investigating the Career Girl Murders, Edward Bulger, was positive the blonde was Janice Wylie, and Whitmore was forced to falsely confess that he had taken the photo from the victim’s apartment at the time of the murders.

When it came to suspects who were black, Bulger had a curious way of identifying liars he was questioning. He reportedly once boasted to two Manhattan assistant DA’s: “You can always tell when a negro is lying. You watch his stomach. If it moves in and out, he’s lying.”

To the cops and prosecutors, the snapshot was considered hard evidence, along with the coerced confession, to charge Whitmore, even though Wylie’s father and others who knew his daughter had emphatically denied that the blonde in the photo was Janice Wylie.

Much later, after it was clear that Whitmore had been coerced into confessing, investigators actually tracked down the two girls in the old snapshot. They told police that it had been taken years earlier while they were picnicking in a New Jersey state park, and it had long been lost. Somehow, Whitmore had found it and, for whatever reason, the teenager had put it in his wallet.

THE REAL KILLER

After his arraignment, and having a lawyer representing him for the first time — an attorney who didn’t believe he had committed the crimes with which he was charged — Whitmore recanted his confession. But the cops and prosecutors still considered him the Wylie-Hoffert killer.

“The world was different in the ’60s. There were very few minority people on the police force, or in the district attorney’s office, so the black population didn’t have much influence on the legal system,” says Jerome Leftow, who first represented Whitmore after his arrest.

A native New Yorker who practiced criminal defense law for some 40 years, Leftow, looking back, told The Post:

“The police were able to do things that were wrong. The district attorney’s office played around with evidence. That’s how they solved crimes back then. There was no one looking over anyone’s shoulder, and they looked at black people in a different way.”

After Whitmore truthfully recanted his confession — there was never any credible evidence that he had committed the crimes for which he was charged — Richard “Ricky” Robles, 21, a heroin addict and confessed burglar from The Bronx with a criminal record, became the prime suspect.

Another junkie by the name of Nathan Delaney, who was facing a drug-related charge, reached out to detectives saying he knew who killed Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, in hopes that he could cut a deal for himself. Delaney and his wife, Marjorie, told cops that on the day of the freedom march in Washington, Robles had shown up at the Delaney apartment in Spanish Harlem with blood on his shirt and had told them he had murdered two girls.

During questioning, police eventually learned that the murder of Wylie and Hoffert had been a robbery gone bad, Robles looking for drug money and finding the girls instead.

The police and prosecutorial mishandling of Whitmore would play a key role in the Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 5-to-4 ruling requiring law-enforcement officers to tell those arrested of their constitutional rights, known as the Miranda warning. In the decision, the justices pointed to the outrageous handling of Whitmore:

“Interrogation procedure may even give rise to a false confession. The most recent conspicuous example occurred in New York when a negro of limited intelligence confessed to two brutal murders and a rape which he had not committed. When this was discovered the prosecutor was reported as saying: ‘Call it what you want — brain-washing, hypnosis, fright.’ They made him give an untrue confession . . .”

And the events involving Whitmore would influence the 1965 abolishment of the death penalty in New York by the state Legislature, with an assemblyman citing the case of how a wrong man could have been sentenced to die.

THE FALLOUT

Ricky Robles was convicted and sentenced on Jan. 11, 1966, to a term of 25 years to life.

Having turned 70 last Jan. 28, Robles is one of New York state’s longest-serving inmates, living in a 72-square-feet cell and mopping floors for a dollar a day at the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility, according to a prison spokeswoman. He comes up for parole again next year, but it’s doubtful he’ll ever see the outside again.

After Whitmore’s Kafkaesque ordeal — it would take almost a decade for him to finally be vindicated and all of the charges against him dismissed — he had returned to his hometown of Wildwood, fell in to anonymity and spent most of the $500,000 he had won after suing the city of New York for his false arrest. He died last year in a nursing home at the age of 68.

Observes Kenneth Gross, the ex-reporter who covered the case: “A lot of prosecutors knew that kid Whitmore was innocent. A lot of cops knew that kid was innocent. There was a lot of heat and a lot of pressure to get that case solved, and all those people were reluctant to give that kid any edge.”